Crossing national boundaries: A typology of qualified immigrants’ career orientations JELENA ZIKIC 1 * , JAIME BONACHE 2 AND JEAN-LUC CERDIN 3 1 School of Human Resource Management, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 2 Department of Human Resource Management, ESADE Business School, Barcelona/Madrid, Spain 3 ESSEC Business School, Cergy-Pontoise Cedex, France Summary This qualitative study examines objective–subjective career interdependencies within a sample of 45 qualified immigrants (QIs) in Canada, Spain and France. The particular challenges in this type of self-initiated international careers arise from the power of institutions and local gatekeepers, the lack of recognition for QIs’ foreign career capital, and the need for proactivity. Resulting from primary data analysis, we identify six major themes in QIs’ subjective interpretations of objective barriers: Maintaining motivation, managing identity, developing new credentials, developing local know-how, building a new social network and evaluating career success. Secondary data analysis distinguishes three QI career orien- tations—embracing, adaptive and resisting orientations—with each portraying distinct patterns of motivation, identity and coping. This study extends the boundaryless career perspective by providing a more fine-grained understanding of how qualified migrants manage both physical and psychological mobility during self-initiated international career transitions. With regards to the interdependence between objective and subjective career aspects, it illustrates the importance of avoiding preference to one side at the neglect of the other, or treating the two sides as independent of one another. Practical implications are proposed for career management efforts and receiving economies. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords: boundaryless career; qualified immigrants; career orientations; mobility; coping Introduction Contemporary careers have been described as ‘boundaryless’, in the sense that they are increasingly embedded in a more dynamic and boundary-spanning knowledge economy, often involving ‘opportunities that go beyond any single employer’ (DeFillippi & Arthur, 1996: p. 116). Accompanying these changes in careers is a trend towards international mobility among workers who are seeking opportunities to cross geographical, national and cultural boundaries (Tung, 2008). So far, research on international career mobility has paid most attention to expatriates—individuals sent by their employers outside of their home countries for temporary work assignments (e.g. Scullion & Journal of Organizational Behavior J. Organiz. Behav. 31, 667–686 (2010) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.705 *Correspondence to: Jelena Zikic, School of Human Resource Management, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. E-mail: jelenaz@yorku.ca Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 15 August 2008 Revised 5 March 2010 Accepted 22 March 2010